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Wednesday, October 23, 2013

Loading pulp paper at Eastport. In the 1840's a ship landed from Europe almost daily.

James Fallows loves to fly and he loves talking to people. So he and his wife are touring the country in his plane, reporting on stirrings in small cities across the country. I'm delighted that he has gotten to Maine. I hope we'll soon have reports from Belfast and Rockland. I'm banking on lots of pictures at Front Street Shipyard, the new force in shipbuilding in Maine. James Fallows - Authors - The Atlantic: "Greetings from the American city closest to Europe, and first to see each day's sunrise: Eastport, Maine, which Marketplace will describe in its broadcast on Friday and which we'll say more about starting tomorrow. The scene above is of an unimaginably vast warehouse full of bales of Maine hardwood pulp, destined for mills in Asia.The "pulp," which I had envisioned as a kind of slurry, turns out to be thick sheaves of papery material, which will then be re-ground and turned into high-quality paper in Chinese, Korean, and Japanese mills. Each of the small footlocker-sized rectangles shown above weighs more than 500 pounds. We watched them loaded into a Norwegian-flag freighter, with a Filipino captain and crew, at the Eastport dock at a rate of 28 tons (one of the truckloads below) every 90 seconds or so."